Tonight's Ig Nobel ceremony,
a festival of dubious achievements in the realm of science, may be nigh
sold out (as of yesterday, all but a few "imperfect view" seats had
already been snatched up). But you can still catch all the glorious,
uproarious, tonque-in-cheek geekery tonight -- from the comfort of your
living room, no less.

- A 60-second keynote speech from Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry

- The Penny-Wise Guys singing ditties about Bernie Madoff, plus a mini-opera on the collapse of Wall Street

- "The 24/7 lectures," which star a slew of geniuses -- including Stephen Wolfram, creator of the spooky, totally-not-Skynet search engine Wolfram Alpha -- describing research topics twice: once in 24 seconds, and again in 7 words

- Special cameo appearances by Don Featherstone (the inventor of the pink lawn flamingo), Deborah Anderson (the researcher who studied the effect of Coke on sperm motility), and Francis Fesmire (who discovered you can cure the hiccups via rectal probe).

Obviously, nothing beats watching this stuff in flesh (it's also a good place to corner XKCD creator Randall Munroe, one of tonight's "Minordomos," and ask him about his own dubious researchprojects
-- both vaguely NSFW). But if you're not lucky enough to sit among the
city's top-tier nerderati tonight, get your Ig Nobel fix here: